Loung Ung

Loung Ung (17 April 1970-) was a Cambodian-American human rights activist and lecturer who survived the Cambodian Genocide of the 1970s.

Biography
Loung Ung was born in Phnom Penh, Khmer Republic in 1970, the daughter of a FANK officer and a Chinese immigrant mother. She was afforded a privileged upbringing due to her father's government service, but, in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and ordered all of its inhabitants to flee for three days, claiming that the United States was about to bomb the city, and that they could return three days later. Instead, she and her family would join thousands of Cambodian refugees in walking into the countryside and being assigned to work camps. Her siblings were beat as they tried to steal food for themselves and the family, as the Khmer Rouge guards gave out very little food to the camp workers. Her two older brothers were sent to serve in the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea, while her older sister Keav was reassigned to a different work camp, where she died of illness. Not long after, her father was taken away to repair a bridge, never to return; Loung expected that he would be killed. Soon after, her mother told Loung, her brother, and her sister Kim to flee to different camps under the pretense that they were orphans. She and her sister stuck together and were assigned to a new camp, where they were indoctrinated and trained as child soldiers. When she was later allowed to visit her younger sister at her old camp, she learned that her mother and sister had been taken away by Khmer Rouge soldiers, and she imagined that they had both been executed in the "killing fields". She and her siblings were later liberated from their camp by Vietnamese PAVN troops, only to be forced to flee again when the Khmer Rouge attacked the camp. They made their way to a Red Cross camp, and the three of them were adopted by a family in Essex Junction, Vermont in the United States. They were tutored in English, and she managed to overcome her depression, culture shock, and suicidal thoughts by writing hundreds of pages about her life under the Khmer Rouge. She went on to write two books about her life from 1975 to 2003, and she settled in Shaker Heights, Ohio with her American husband. Loung also became a prominent anti-landmine activist, having witnessed several landmine deaths during her days in Cambodia.